The Tough-Talking Godmother of Downtown Art

A bastion of American art: Edith Gregor Halpert and some of her artists were featured in an article in Life magazine in March 1952.Credit
Getty Images/Time-Life Archive, copyright Louis Faurer estate

Lindsay Pollock’s informative biography of the New York art dealer Edith Gregor Halpert reads a bit like a second draft that should have been returned to its author with requests for further research, greater skepticism and deeper insights, not to mention fewer platitudes, repetitions and historical generalizations. Doubts might also have been raised about the cloying yet aggrandizing title, “The Girl With the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market.”

Even so, this book is the first to retrieve from oblivion this dynamic, pioneering art dealer and shrewd, abrasive proprietor of the Downtown Gallery. A bastion of American art — and especially American Scene painting — it existed for more than 40 years, first in Greenwich Village, then on East 51st Street and finally at 57th and Park Avenue. Ms. Pollock’s account also provides a rare view of the hardscrabble workings of a commercial art gallery many years before Manhattan became thronged with them.

Born Ginda Fivoosiovitch in Russia in 1900, Mrs. Halpert came to New York with her mother and older sister in 1906, after the death of her father, Gregor. She grew up in Harlem and by her mid-teens was supporting herself working in department stores (where she learned quite a bit about selling) while studying art and visiting galleries.

Small and beautiful, Mrs. Halpert was serious, tough-talking and fiercely independent; she smoked and drank. At 18 she married Samuel Halpert, a painter of middling talent 16 years her senior. (Later paramours would include Holger Cahill, a specialist in American folk art, and the artist Charles Sheeler.)

The marriage soon faltered, and Sam died in 1930 of an inner-ear disease whose symptoms Edith had always attributed to hypochondria. But initially marriage to Sam softened the blow of not being an artist herself and provided further art world contacts. He introduced her to Stuart Davis, arguably the greatest artist she represented. Edith opened the gallery on West 13th Street in 1926; she ran it until 1970, when, after several years of increasing disorientation, exacerbated by alcohol, she died of a brain tumor.

Among the art dealers who figure in the rise of modern art in New York, Mrs. Halpert has always been overshadowed. She is not among the 20 figures in Florine Stettheimer’s acidic and well-populated 1942-44 group portrait, “The Cathedrals of Art,” which includes the grand wizard Alfred Stieglitz and Juliana Force, who oversaw the Whitney Studio Club — an early version of the Whitney Museum — where many of the artists Mrs. Halpert would represent got their first exposure. (One wonders if the combination of Mrs. Halpert’s being female and Jewish was a factor in her absence.) Mrs. Halpert and her artists were largely swept aside by the rise of Abstract Expressionism and Pop. Her name rarely comes up in interviews with dealers like Betty Parsons, who opened galleries in the ’40s but were often the same age as Mrs. Halpert.

Over the course of her career Mrs. Halpert exhibited and sold the work of Davis, Sheeler, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Max Weber, William and Marguerite Zorach, Peggy Bacon, Niles Spencer, Ben Shahn and Jack Levine. She had fingers in numerous other American art pies: the rise of American folk art, the interior design of Radio City Music Hall (she introduced Donald Deskey to the Rockefellers through her loyal client Abby Aldrich Rockefeller), the rediscovery of the 19th-century still life painter William Harnett, the founding of the Museum of Modern Art.

Photo

Lindsay PollockCredit
Jesse Winter

Mrs. Pollock portrays her as indefatigable, always on the lookout for a new angle when it came to exhibiting, promoting or selling art. After Alain Locke’s book “The Negro in Art” came out in 1940, Mrs. Halpert proposed organizing a show based on it. “American Negro Art,” which opened late in 1941, included Jacob Lawrence’s landmark “Migration Series,” 60 small terse paintings about the exodus of black labor to the North.

She browbeat the Museum of Modern Art and the Washington collector Duncan Phillips into each buying half of the work (for $1,000 each). It was immediately sent on a national tour, and Mrs. Halpert represented Lawrence for the next 11 years.

Mrs. Halpert’s obscurity may reflect that she discovered very few artists, and none with the implicit glamour of a Georgia O’Keeffe or a Jackson Pollock. Those who didn’t come from the Whitney Club were inherited from Stieglitz, at one point or another, including Sheeler, Marsden Hartley (briefly), O’Keeffe (briefly and tempestuously), John Marin and Arthur Dove.

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Another factor in Mrs. Halpert’s obscurity may be her nearly exclusive concentration on American art, specifically to the politicized American Scene variety that went quickly out of fashion after 1950. With a fervor that can sometimes seem opportunistic, she argued that if American artists got more respect (and sales), they wouldn’t be tempted to adopt European-isms. Conveniently she overlooked Davis’s fruitful and prolonged assimilation of Cubism.

In the retelling of Mrs. Halpert’s story, Ms. Pollock relies heavily on the dealer’s 813-page oral history in the Archive of American Art and her gallery’s extensive files (but doesn’t include a chronology of exhibitions, which would have been fascinating to read and helpful to scholars). This creates some gullible-sounding paraphrases: “Edith would always believe art was for everyone, whether rich or poor, educated or not.” Or: “Edith refused to be discouraged. She kept fighting and believing in the American art cause.”

The narrative contains too many blow-by-blow accounts of sales, exhibition organizing and tussles with collectors, artists and museum curators. Still, it also provides vivid doses of the relentless day-to-day will to self-creation that is essential to having an interesting art gallery, even in flush times like the present.

Ms. Pollock makes passing mention of Mrs. Halpert’s stubbornness and need for control, but it is only at the end of the book, when she can rely on a perceptive interview with Charles Alan, who joined the gallery in the late 1940s, that her subject’s difficult personality comes into sharp focus. Mr. Alan, who took the job with the understanding that Mrs. Halpert would retire in 1950, lived in an apartment above hers (and above the gallery) on 51st Street and sometimes served as an escort. In 1952 he left to form his own gallery, taking with him the sculptor William King, the last of Mrs. Halpert’s rare discoveries.

An exhibition of Mr. King’s early work now at the Alexandre Gallery on East 57th Street includes a wonderful portrait bust of Mrs. Halpert in ceramic, her hair and features delineated in blue atop off-white glaze. A sketchy form of Delftware, the piece dates from 1959. It shows her looking beautiful, blousy and slightly inebriated, but imperious just the same.

Correction: December 29, 2006

The Books of The Times review on Tuesday, about “The Girl With the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market,” by Lindsay Pollock, misstated the length of time that Mrs. Halpert’s Downtown Gallery represented the artist Jacob Lawrence. It was 11 years, not 20.

Correction: January 4, 2007

A picture credit on Dec. 26 with the Books of The Times Review, about “The Girl With the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market,” by Lindsay Pollock, misspelled the surname of the man whose estate holds the copyright to the picture of Mrs. Halpert. He was Louis Faurer, not Fauer.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E11 of the New York edition with the headline: The Tough-Talking Godmother of Downtown Art. Today's Paper|Subscribe